The bedraggled bumblebee queen seemed lifeless. Yet she was somehow alive — still breathing after being underwater for roughly a week in the lab.
Did she manage to hold her breath for all that time, wondered ecological physiologist Charles Darveau. “I did a simple calculation: How much oxygen would they need on board to be able to last that long?” Darveau says. One bumblebee queen roughly one milliliter in volume would need 20 milliliters of oxygen. “So, it was impossible.”
Instead, it turns out submerged queens can survive for days by breathing underwater, Darveau and colleagues at the University of Ottawa in Canada report March 10 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: